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Hunter builds
Overview Hunters are known for their pets, their long-range, sustained DPS, and their traps. The three trees of a Hunter are all viable for a hunter to choose for leveling, player versus player combat, or end game raids or instances, but since only two of the three trees allows for the complete use of talent points the player is forced to cross trees, hybridizing into other talent trees. The three trees all have options to offer for utility, open DPS, and survivability. Beast Mastery Beast Mastery offers the highest potential personal DPS in the game for hunters in the raiding environment. However, this statement is only true if said hunter can use his pet effectively and understands the importance of ranged attack speed in rotation. BM is also the fastest leveling build, as uptime is limited only by the health of your high-armor pet. Example Specs * Examples linking to WoWHead's old talent calculator have been removed and will need to be recreated using working links. Disadvantages of Beast Mastery A large part of the Hunter's damage is imbued in the pet, who must be alive in order to use Bestial Wrath/Beast Within. This is frequently seen as a fatal flaw to the build. This is especially the case in arenas, where your pet will often be the main target of the opponent. Seeing as it does not scale with resilience and only very little with your armor and stamina, it makes an easy target which severely cripples a BM hunter. In raids, the hunter alone should have no trouble keeping their pet alive with Mend Pet and careful control of the pet's actions (treat your pet as a player, if you wouldn't draw aggro from the Main Tank, neither should it). Should the pet die, the Beast Master can recover quickly and cheaply with Improved Revive Pet. Nevertheless, Beast Mastery play-style requires a significant amount of diligence in managing the pet's actions and threats on top of managing threats to the hunter. Marksmanship This strength of this tree lies in burst damage. Your shots are far slower than that of the BM hunter, but you hit quite a bit harder. This tree is also the land of PVP talents. Marksmanship builds tend to have lower overall sustained DPS and are less mana efficient than Beastmaster builds. Example Specs * Examples linking to WoWHead's old talent calculator have been removed and will need to be recreated using working links. Survival Hunter's after Patch 3.1 The following is a collection of information garnered from discussion forums in these early days of the patch. The props for the knowledge you gain from it, if any, go to the active SV hunter community, with a special mention for Xumio of Khadgar, Yet may you find flaws, failures or indiscrepancies those belong soley to myself Of the three Talent trees available to hunters Survival remains the specc with the highest sustained dps output in a PvE context. Changes implemented for the 3.1 Patch Explosive Shot Base damage lowered by 10%. Attack power scaling reduced by 12.5%. This is a significant reduction in the damage this ability does, however the increases derived from modified talents probably over-compensate. Black Arrow - This is a new shot. It yields a 6% overall damage increase buff while the target is affected by it, this damage buff stacks with the damage increase buff of Noxious Stings provided that you also have a Serpent Sting active on the target. Black Arrow also deals Shadow Damage over the 15 seconds that it is active, and most importantly it procs Lock and Load the same way traps do, Serpent Sting however no longer procs Lock and Load making Black Arrow the new major source of Lock and Load procs and therefore a very important part of your new SV Hunter arsenal. Black Arrow shares it CD with traps. Resourcefulness- This new talent reduces the mana cost of all traps, melee abilities and Black Arrow, But perhaps more importantly it also reduces the cooldown of all traps and Black Arrow. Since Black Arrow usually has a 30 sec cooldown having points in this talent will increase its uptime and there for your overall damage. Wyvern Sting- Duration increased from 12 secs to 30, since this ability does not share a cooldown with traps this should make your crowd control duties easier or boring depending on your point of view. Sniper Training- Yields a 2/4/6% damage increase to your Steady Shot , Aimed Shot , Black Arrow & Explosive Shot. This Talent has been altered and no longer becomes active if you are at more then 30 yards rather it activates when you do not move for 6 seconds, the buff then remains active for 15 seconds and is reapplied every 6 seconds. Keep this in mind while in boss encounters that require some movement such as Grobbulus. The talent yields an increase of 5/10/15% critical strike chance on your Kill Shot this is a constant and does not require the buff to be active. Hunting Party - Has been changed to a 3-point talent and increases Agility by 1/2/3% and your critical strikes from Steady Shot , Arcane Shot & Explosive Shot will have a 33/66/100% chance to give up to 10 members of your Party/Raid the Replenishment buff, the merits of which are debatable in a Raiding context. Serpent Sting - This ability no longer procs Lock and Load, however the damage increase you get with Noxious Stings does stack with the damage increase of Black Arrow so there does remain some significant merit to keeping a Serpent Sting active on your target. There is some major debate about to use of Glyph's related to this that will be dealt with later on. Kill Shot - This ability is now on the Global Cooldown Trap Mastery - This Talent now gives duration or damage bonusses to all your Trap's and to Black Arrow (Damage in the case of the latter). This has two possibly important repurcussions 1. This is now likely to be a talent prefered over Hawk Eye since Sniper Training no longer requires an extended range and 2. kiting will now be a lot easier without picking up talents and or glyphs for soley that purpose. T.N.T.- This talent has been altered to now increase the damage done by your Explosive Shot , Explosive Trap , Immolation Trap & Black Arrow by 2/4/6% Lock and Load- This talent has been altered to now give a 33/66/100% chance if your target is affected by Frost Trap , Freezing Trap or Freezing Arrow and a 3/7/10% chance when your target is affected by Immolation Trap or Black Arrow to cause your next two Explosive Shot's (Or Arcane Shot's but you should not be using these) to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo. Making your Survival Build First and foremost there is no such thing as THE SV hunter build, if anyone tells you different they are most likely alliance players and have poor personal hygiene. Although you might have read or heard the first sentence before lets take a few lines to look into why there is no such thing as the ideal SV hunter build because this might help you in creating your own talent build. First of all it depends on what you want to do with your SV hunter, if you have a desire to mainly PvP this has different implications for your build then if you prefer to PvE. And even if you prefer to PvP there are significant differences between BG's and for example Arena's on the other hand being a good Raider requires a different build then instancing HC's or soloing your way through Icecrown. This being said the following deals with PvE often from a Raiders perspective, since a certain someone sucks at PvP. Another important reason why there is no such thing as the ideal SV Hunter Build is because it depends on the gear you have managed to acquire or rather on the stats you have. For example if you have 750 Agility (Which is way to low, go gear up.) vs. having 1700 Agility (Seriously, go seek profesional help.)a 1% increase of your Agility from Hunting Party will have strongly differing affects. If your Agility is low you might very well be better of spending your talent point elsewhere. The same goes for being Hitcapped, Being hitcapped is very important if you like raiding and reasonably important if you spend lots of time in Heroic Dungeons. You are hitcapped if you have a hitrating of 263 or a hit percentage of 8%. Being hitcapped basically means that your attacks won't miss in boss encounters, missing causes you to loose a lot of dps and thats why you should very much want and try to be hitcapped. The talent Focused Aim give you a 1/2/3% increase in your hitpercentage (Which now stacks to your pet as well), you should strive to get your full 263 hitrating (8%) from your gear, gemz, enchants and food because because this leaves you free to spend talent points elsewhere then in Focused Aim, however if you can't manage this on your gear yet it is more valuable to get hitcapped through Focused Aim, thus forcing you to sacrifice a talent point somewhere else. You can go even further in making descions on your build in raid encounter for example you may consider Pet Survivability or the amount of movement that a boss encounter requires and favour different builds on the outcome of such considerations. The above should have made clear that building your talent tree is a personal affair that depends on your own preferences, the circumstances you expect to encounter and the gear/stats you have managed to acquire so far. It is one of the parts of the game were you get to tweak, customize and finetune your own character and should be considered a fun thing to experiment with, so don't be afraid to do just that and blow a sack of gold on respeccing and shooting a bunch of holes in the target dummy every now and again thats what they're for. -Work in Progres- Feel free to help out - Ganwolfclaw (EU) Sporeggar - Survival plays on the Hunter's main stats: Agility, Attack Power and Crit Chance. The first thing Survival Hunters should know is that Explosive Shot is designed to be used instead of Arcane Shot since they both share a cooldown. Example Specs * Examples linking to WoWHead's old talent calculator have been removed and will need to be recreated using working links. 3.1 Raid: *Raid Support (40/31/0)(Ganwolfclaw (EU) Sporeggar) Some hunters out there that are not into PvP might be wondering what the dualspec has to offer them. They may find this a usefull suggestion. This specc is probably only worth going for in 25 man raids or maybe when your off to raid a capital or WG. Also before taking this build these rules of thumb are suggested; the lowest dps gear rating in your raid is somewhere around 1900 on WoW-heroes, you are the lowest dps hunter or can get the most dps out of this build, whichever leads to the smallest decrease in overall dps. The major drawback of this build is that it will pretty much cut your dps in half, if however you followed the rules of thumb above it will be like you brought between 1,5/2 extra dps'ers to the raid overall. Make sure that the other hunters understand that your Hunter's Mark goes on the big boss and they should stick theirs elsewhere, don't forget to smack yours on the add that needs to be burned down quick too. This build loses pretty much all its value if there is a MM hunter in your raid and quit some value if their is a BM hunter in your raid. It is however a big bonus to the SV hunters in your raid. *Survival (6/14/51) (Ganwolfclaw (EU) Sporeggar) This Build suggestion is intended for Hunters that have managed to reach the hitcap (263)without talentpoints, yet their ag contribution from gear is still on the lowside. This build is also a bit more forgiving if you aren't able to constantly weave the optimum rotation. Basically it should be a nice build for an active casual raider before finally collecting all your end game gear. If there is an oom issue in 10mans you might wanna make some sacrifices to get Thrill of the Hunt. Category:Guides Category:Talents Category:Hunter talents